The advent of the Internet provides Internet users with a worldwide web of information at the click of a button. As the Internet continues to grow and occupy a ubiquitous position within society, Internet service providers are continuously in competition for providing users with Internet access. Generally, Internet service providers (ISPs) use one or more server computers, which are designed to provide customers of the ISP with Internet access. Unfortunately, as the ISP's customer base grows, the ISP's data center is required to house additional servers in order to provide Internet access to new customers.
Accordingly, central processing unit (CPU) space is at a substantially high premium within an ISP's data center. To combat the war on processor real estate, various companies are shipping slim line, full-featured servers and storage units for the space-constrained ISP. These companies have established a new industry standard for today's Internet servers. According to the new industry standard, the dimension of a server may be limited to 19 inches wide by 1.75 inches high or one rack unit (1U). Hence, compliant servers are commonly referred to as 1U servers.
However, although 1U servers may be compact in size, such servers are required to provide continuously increasing data throughput levels. Hence, technologies, such as data pipelining, out-of-order execution and the like, are required to enable such 1U server architectures to operate at significantly higher clock rates to achieve the data throughput levels. However, the increased clock rates and processing speeds of corresponding IU processors result in substantial heating when incorporated within a 1U server. Consequently, conventional techniques, such as using a solid metal heat sink on top of the processor, while passing air through extended surfaces of the heat sink, are insufficient for dissipating heat produced by modern days 1U processors.